Follow me for the New Working Blue blog . . .

There are some visual changes coming to Working Blue!

Stay tuned!

Update: I screwed up. After upgrading to 2.1.2, things are not quite right. My categories don’t show up. Many comments are MIA. My question? WTF?? Dang!

I need to redo the upgrade, but I don’t want to overwrite my files!! What to do? Save the “content” file and add that at the end of my re-upgrade?

BTW: This header won’t stay. It’s just a template. OKAY?

Last episode. What a let down.

My memory of the Sopranos spans so many stages of life, however, that the ending seems like a personal “fade to black”. The first time I heard of the show was during a break in a graduate seminar with Victor Vitanza. Talking to us all, Victor asked if we were watching this new show about a mobster in therapy. Freud came up quite a bit in the excited talk that followed. I had no idea what the fuss was about.

A year later, I rented the first season to finally see why everyone was raving about this show. I think I watch the whole season in two days. I was hooked. It was the mother that hooked me: someone who saw only the rightness of her intense cruelty.

In Austin, I lived alone for the first time in a while. Since I was the only one with HBO, a few good friends would come over on Sunday nights for a Sopranos watching party in my tiny house. I’d cook something and the beer would be liberally passed around. After the show ended, we would sit around and gossip about people we knew.

As I got to know a new friend, we talked a lot about shows we were watching. Sopranos was one of them. We would talk about characters we liked, plot lines, and the idea of violence on the screen (and why it never bothered us).

Passover at my future sister-in-law’s house. We hadn’t seen the last season of the show, since both Rice and I had given up HBO. (Actually, he never had it. I gave it up when I moved to State College.) Late at night, after Debi had gone to bed, we sat on the couch on watched the show recorded on her Tivo. I don’t remember the episode, but I do remember that he kissed me.

It’s almost been four weeks since my wonderful, beautiful daughter was born. I can’t tell you how much I love this little joy. She’s perfect. Pregnancy, however, was a bitch. Every minute was worth it, of course. But I don’t miss the pregnancy experience one bit. Now my body has moved into the final stage of pregnancy: postpartum. This body is sort of like my old body—not expanded in weird ways—but it’s not the same. Not by any stretch of the imagination. For example: my tummy is a gut now, my ribcage is bigger, and my thighs are. . . well, they’re huge. Running is going to be my best friend in the coming months.

I missed running so much that I dreamed about it in the last nine months. It’s not just the slimming character of running that I miss; it’s the psychological and emotional cleansing that running brings a runner. The first jump back into the running life isn’t going to be easy. Anyone can tell you that postpartum running has its own ups-n-downs. I’ll have to start by walking, but that’s fine by me. I plan to start walking thirty minutes next week, and then slowly working my way up to running in two weeks.

How soon will my old body return? Who knows. But the juices that come from a good run will return soon enough. And that’s good for now. Next purchase?

Handling a newborn has taught me that we’re born with an almost supernatural ability to bend and squish. My three-week old is so flexible that she can fit in positions the rest of us would find impossible. That’s a gift of nature, allowing them to squish into a tight wombspace and then through a relatively small birth canal. As she grows, of course, that flexibility will give way to more stability and strength.

I’ve thought about this bodily feature as a parallel for life right now in the Rice household. There is a lot on our plates: moving two houses, selling a house in a terrible market, and trying to plan a life around a hosts of unknowns. In times like this, I learn that I deal with stress by trying to control all of it. It’s the equivalent of using all my muscular stability and strength to change my circumstances: it can’t be done. Some things are not within my sphere of influence. This is one of those times when I would be better served by “going soft,” or returning to that ability to stay flexible. Bend to the tight spaces.

I watch my daughter sleep and wake, all with a sense of softness. We must have all started out that way. Now we just have to figure out how to reclaim that ability.

Now that I have a few minutes (at 5:30 am?!), I’ll toss out some quick observations from my first time as a Stage I CCCC reviewer. The opportunity wasn’t wasted on me. I took the whole thing very seriously, and the experience itself surprised me. The surprise was more a result of my own reaction to the different panel proposals I saw. After years of complaining about the predictability and general lameness of many CCCC panels (“How did this get on the program?”, I think I’m now starting to understand why certain things appear. One of my biggest surprises:

• Alternatives:
  There were several “alternative” formats proposed in my batch of proposals. I’ve long complained about the boring panel presentations that drive this conference. Three people sit at a long table, each presenter reading a paper more dull than the last. I saw that this format wasn’t necessarily limiting people’s imagination of what’s possible in 75-minutes. However, I also found that I rated these panels lower than the “traditional” proposals.

Why? One reason: feasibility. This is a judgment call on my part, of course, but the non-traditional panels did not seem feasible to me. They called for increased audience participation (such as breakout groups and open discussion), but the topics simply did not seem to promise a huge draw. That’s not to say that these panels wouldn’t get a good audience. At the same time, these alternative formats demand enough people to support a workable alternative. I’ve been to enough CCCC panels where the audience consisted of five people to know that not every “good” topic will draw in a crowd. The fact of the matter is that a traditional (dull) panel presentation can sustain a tiny audience. Even if it’s depressing, the performativity of it all isn’t lost. On the other hand, an alternative format (group discussion, breakout groups, etc.) with five people will affect the performativity of that session.

The problem isn’t with these proposals. We should be proposing and doing alternative sessions—just as twelve of us did two years ago at Cs in an alternative panel. Perhaps there is a problem with the way things are set up in the conference itself. How many panels actually draw in more than 10 people, I wonder? How can those numbers be changed? Why do we continue to set up this dynamic of over-supply? Or is it really an oversupply problem? Could it be otherwise?

And speaking of change, I hear my daughter calling me. . .

As predicted, blogging has been light these past two weeks. Sometimes I look at the computer and imagine what I would write about if I sat down to blog.

Maybe I’d talk about how my daughter’s Simhat Bat is coming up this Friday. Her Hebrew name is Vered Eliana bat Yaakov. I hope she gains a lot of strength from her faith.

And maybe I could talk about the lessons I’ve already learned from Vered. Rule number one is: “Stay flexible.” That’s a trait I’ve tried to develop before, but I guess it’s something that needs “hands on” training.

Or, on the other hand, I could talk about the experience of moving twice in one summer—once to Detroit and then to Missouri. I could talk about the difficult task of timing and balance. Thank goodness I’m learning the art of flexibiilty (see above).

I could talk about my eagerness to leave State College. Though Penn State is a terrific place, the town itself never grew on me. Some people claim to love it. In the past two years, I only came to hate it more and more.

Drifting even further away from pressing issues, I might consider blogging about my experience as a Stage I reviewer for CCCC. What an interesting eye-opener that is. Being on the other side of the CCCC reviewing process gives me some perspective on how certain kinds of panels make it, while others seem to always get turned down. As I read some proposals for more theoretically-driven panels, I saw how out of place and decontextualized they felt. More on that in another blog post. . .

And maybe I’d just sit down and blog about nothing at all.

In case you wondered, some background on the name Vered. More common than you probably ever knew.

Here it is—all the messy details. Thanks for all your good wishes!

Labor began last Sunday night, when my water broke (but just a little). We weren’t even totally sure that it had really happened. I went to my morning midwife appointment on Monday, when she informed us that the water had indeed broken. We went straight to the hospital. I thought that I’d be entering labor any minute. . . but I was wrong. So very wrong.

After doses of labor-inducing drugs, I finally started getting strong contractions around midnight. By that time, I was exhausted. And the hard part was only beginning. From midnight to 6:00 am on Tuesday, I went through some wicked contractions. I almost fell asleep between contractions because I was so tired. But the contractions were super strong, and the whole cycle just felt like the worst thing ever. At 6:00 in the morning, my midwife told me I was only 6 cm dilated. Not what I wanted to hear.

I couldn’t do another few hours of these induced contractions, so I asked for an epidural. That wasn’t my original plan, but I couldn’t move around much because I had to be hooked up to an IV. (Laboring in bed or in a chair just doesn’t cut it.) The epidural helped me dilate pretty fast. By 8:00, I was ready to push. My second mistake was thinking that I was almost done. Ha! I pushed for three hours before Vered finally arrived.

As if things weren’t hard enough, my placenta refused to budge. I avoided going to the OR, but only because of 1 1/2 hours of manual removal. Ouch.

Vered has been wonderful. She’s sweet and calm. It’s a lot of work, but I can’t think of any better way to start my summer. I love it.

Thanks for all the well wishes. More will follow soon. But, in the meantime, see an explanation here for why the blog will be light (as in “Lite”) for the next few days.